School Boys climb mount Everest

With the hoisting of the Tricolour and the school flag on the highest peak of the Everest, a seven-member team of students of The Lawrence School,
Sanawar, has set a new record of being the youngest team to scale the Everest on Tuesday. Four among the seven climbers of Class 12 are
from Punjab, while others are from Delhi, Himachal Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh.

This herculean feat has accorded them the claim of being the only boarding school in the world to unfurl the Tricolour and the school flag atop the
lofty peak. The school has also become the first school worldwide to send a team to the Mt Everest. Six boys are 16 years of age and
Raghav Juneja is of 15 years, making him the youngest Indian to scale the Mt Everest. He has now beaten the record of Arjun Vajpai, who was 16 when he
scaled the Everest. Many expeditions have trudged atop the Everest since Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tensing summited the peak way back in 1953.
Sixty years later, seven students of Sanawar made the history and glorified their alma mater.

The team - Sanawar Everest Expedition 2013 - led by Col Neeraj Rana (retd), former principal, Himalayan Mountaineering Institute (HMI), Darjeeling,
was shortlisted among the volunteers after a gruelling basic mountaineering course at Himalayan Mountaineering Institute. The team members -
Privthvi Chahal, Ajay Sohal, Raghav Joneja, Shubham Kaushik, Fateh Brar, Guribadat Singh and Hakikat Grewal - arrived at the base camp in Nepal on
April 19. Congratulating the boys, school headmaster Praveen Vashisht said the conquest of the Everest was not a mere step, but a giant leap for
Sanawar. "They have indomitably upheld their school credo - Never Give In - in letter and spirit," he quipped.

This beats the field trips and science fair projects we used to do. Now all the cool kids will be climbing Mt. Everest. The standard question when
being asked out on a date will be "Have you climbed Mt. Everest yet?" And when the last kid to climb Mt. Everest gets to the peak she will be mocked
unmercifully for being a slow poke.

EDIT: I looked on search to try to find that multizillion-pixel pic of Mt. Everest, and saw a thread that a 13-year old American boy had climbed to
the peak. Perhaps the pre-teens will get into the act soon.

Climbing Mt. Everest is no longer such a great achievement, it doesn't rank much higher than completing a Marathon or trekking the Via Sacra in Spain.

The only real difficulty is the height, and that you can acclimatize to to a certain degree. The Sherpas really do all the work, and literally prod
and carry the climbers to the top and back down again. Yet, everyone flaunts all the "firsts" to reach the top recently.

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